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If you google goal setting you’ll find thousands of results about S.M.A.R.T. goals. This is a widely used and great method, often used also in corporate environment. However, it is misses a couple of aspects of goal setting. Here are my problems with SMART goals.

When the year-end is coming, many people start to think about what they accomplished during that year. It is a great opportunity to stop and do self-reflection. Whether you are a person who likes New Year’s resolutions and goalsetting or the person who prefers to live at the moment, self-reflection will definitely have positive impacts on you.

We live our lives in continuous connection with others. Internet gives us a lot of opportunities to avoid human contact, but it does not mean you do not need to communicate with others. Actually I think it became even more important to be able to express our thoughts and feelings effectively. We may need to prepare ourselves for public speaking for a job or explain something to our family. Communication is an essential part of our lives.

In my previous article I started to share with you some tips for speech preparation. You already know that you need to get to know your audience and the circumstances. You should become an expert of your topic even if you did not choose it. It is also important to prepare first the speech itself and only after the visual aids. What else can you do to prepare for your speech? Here are some more methods which have already worked for me.

Nowadays it is not enough if you are good at something, you must be able to present it flawlessly as well. I was asked several times for job interviews to prepare a presentation as a prework for the interview. However according to some studies a huge percentage of people are actually fear more of public speaking than death. I believe that if you prepare properly and practise, you can be a master of presentations. Some of us feel more natural to be on the stage, others of us spend a lot of time practising to get used to it. But it is a skill which can be developed. You can develop too.

Goal settings, to do lists, successful people, we hear about them all the time, even here on Silver Lining Ideas site. However, there are some moments in life, when we do not know how to carry on. We feel that we are supposed to figure out how to continue our lives, what to do next, but our brains are sometimes empty and we have no idea what to do.

We can hear mindfulness nowadays a lot, but it still seems a little bit mysterious thing. What is mindfulness really about? How can you implement it into your daily life? Let’s see first Wikipedia’s description of it:

“Mindfulness is the psychological process of bringing one’s attention to experiences occurring in the present moment, which one can develop through the practice of meditation and through other training.”

Even though Star Wars is “just” a science-fiction, it is full of learnings what we can implement. George Lucas studied Eastern cultures and created a world where Jedi are guardians of peace and justice. Whether you like Star Wars or not, you should read the teachings of the Jedi, because the principles they apply are valid for our everyday lives.

The literature, theaters and movies are full of stories of diaries. People since centuries has been writing about what happened to them, recording their feelings and memories. In our digital world, we have plenty of opportunities to record all these things. Does it still make sense to write a diary?